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Wednesday, May 8, 2013

5/07/2013 @ 7:02PM

Warren Buffett (Photo courtesy of Levo League)

On Tuesday afternoon Warren Buffett sat down with Levo League, a “community of professional women seeking advice, inspiration, and the tools needed to succeed,” and fielded live questions from across the internet about everything from women in the workplace to his personal heroes. From his office in Omaha, America’s second richest man not only dispensed a bounty of practical career advice, but also outlined the personal philosophy that keeps him motivated and has inspired his advocacy of gender equality.

During the second half of the hour long video chat Buffett responded to more than a dozen questions, posed by thousands of online mentees. He encouraged them to “hang around with people who are better than you are,” refine their communication skills, not to be afraid of failure and to “never give up searching for the job you’re passionate about.”

But Buffett began Tuesday’s discussion by deconstructing the absurdity that is gender discrimination. He first noticed the phenomenon as a boy, when his sisters Doris and Bertie, described by Buffett as “as smart as I am, probably a little smarter, and much more personable,” were encouraged to marry well, while he was told repeatedly that the sky was his professional limit. Later, at Columbia University, there was only one woman in Buffett’s MBA class. In his words, “it was a joke.”

By popular moral standards, this sort of discrimination would be considered objectively wrong, on the grounds that it is unfair. But Buffett’s objection runs much deeper than that. In his view, bias of any kind is “just plain foolish” on an economic level.

Because top flight talent is such a precious commodity in a competitive environment, business owners and hiring managers “have to take it wherever [they] can get it.” To allow irrational biases to influence business decisions of any kind is ultimately costly to ownership, as the practice is economically inefficient. For if an organization does not hire the best talent due to institutional discrimination, the outfit will soon find itself at a competitive disadvantage to firms that base their personnel decisions exclusively on merit.

In addition to his economic argument against discrimination, Buffett touched on an interesting ethical one. In his talk with Levo League, Buffett summed up his message with the following maxim: “everybody should get a chance to live up to their potential.” Discrimination, of course, can be a powerful obstacle for any individual confronted with it in their quest to realize their personal potential.

It is through the realization of one’s potential that one identifies and gains the ability to do what makes them happy. For Buffett, what makes him happy is running Berkshire Hathaway and pursuing investment ideas. Reminiscent of the Aristotelian notion ofeudaimonia, he views his happiness not as a fixed status he has seized, but as a perpetual and boundless activity. This view is what ultimately keeps him motivated and hard at work, despite his massive fortune. In Buffett’s words, “I am painting this painting that is Berkshire Hathaway; the canvas is an unlimited size.”

Because Buffett was allowed to realize his potential as perhaps the greatest investor of all time, achieving excellence in the discipline he is passionate about, he appears to have attained a rare kind of productive contentment. His argument is simply that all women should have equal opportunity to do the same. And ultimately, by realizing the potential of the entire human population, we will all be better off. As far as Buffett sees it, “the future is terrific.”